When photons hurtle toward a black hole, most are sucked into its depths, never to return, or gently deflected away. A rare few, however, skirt the hole, making a series of abrupt U-turns. Some of […]
Category: quantamagazine
You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. Years later, you walk into a […]
If someone tells you a fact you already know, they’ve essentially told you nothing at all. Whereas if they impart a secret, it’s fair to say something has really been communicated. This distinction is at […]
Astronomers have revealed the first photograph of an exoplanet taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The image shows the bright blob of a world seven times heavier than Jupiter that orbits a star […]
Isaac Newton was not known for his generosity of spirit, and his disdain for his rivals was legendary. But in one letter to his competitor Gottfried Leibniz, now known as the Epistola Posterior, Newton comes […]
Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of computing at the California Institute of Technology and senior director of machine learning research at Nvidia, has a bone to pick with the matrix. Her misgivings are not about the […]
“All of the life forms on Earth have the same problem,” said Jonathan Kagan, an immunology researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “And that is dealing with infection.” Just as we worry about bacterial infections, bacteria […]
A basic fact of geometry, known for millennia, is that you can draw a line through any two points in the plane. Any more points, and you’re out of luck: It’s not likely that a […]
Dreams are so personal, subjective and fleeting, they might seem impossible to study directly and with scientific objectivity. But in recent decades, laboratories around the world have developed sophisticated techniques for getting into the minds […]
If today’s cryptography protocols were to fail, it would be impossible to secure online connections — to send confidential messages, make secure financial transactions, or authenticate data. Anyone could access anything; anyone could pretend to […]
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